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VMware, Riverbed integrate SD-WANs with Azure Virtual WAN

VMware and Riverbed have integrated their SD-WAN software with Azure Virtual WAN, improving interoperability between the products and Microsoft Azure.

Antone Gonsalves
By
Published: 27 Sep 2018

VMware and Riverbed have announced integration between their respective SD-WAN products and Azure Virtual WAN, an integration hub for companies connecting multiple offices to applications running on Microsoft Azure.

The companies announced the integrations at Microsoft's Ignite conference in Orlando, Fla. VMware did not provide a release date for the integration between NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud and Azure Virtual WAN. Riverbed said customers could connect its SteelConnect SD-WAN with the Microsoft integration service immediately.

VMware plans to add Azure Virtual WAN to its Virtual Cloud Network (VCN), which it introduced last month at the company's VMworld conference in Las Vegas. VCN is a single network abstraction that brings a consistent operational model to the data center, branch and cloud provider. The architecture includes security, along with the universal connectivity.

Through VCN, VMware customers will be able to connect to any of Azure Virtual WAN's more than 130 points of presence. Riverbed customers, on the other hand, will use the SteelConnect Manager console to link to the Azure hub for branch-to-branch and branch-to-Azure connectivity.

Since last year, Riverbed has been gradually turning SteelConnect Manager into a single management console for overseeing the company's wireless LAN access points and switches and its SD-WAN appliances and software.

Riverbed SteelFusion update

Also at Ignite, Riverbed said it had added support for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor in Riverbed's SteelFusion hyper-converged product. SteelFusion combines software-defined storage, WAN optimization and virtualization into a platform for branch or remote offices.

In 2016, Riverbed added support for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in SteelFusion. As a result, companies could use either cloud provider as a secondary storage tier.

Vodafone agrees to offer Juniper Contrail SD-WAN

In other SD-WAN news this week, Juniper Networks announced that Vodafone, a British telecommunications company, will offer Juniper's Contrail SD-WAN to enterprises. Vodafone customers can choose from a list of SD-WAN vendors in the carrier's Ready Network portfolio.

Juniper delivers the product on customer premise equipment (CPE) that can run multiple virtualized network functions (VNFs), such as firewalls and WAN optimization. The CPE runs the VNFs on a Linux-based x86 server.

Contrail SD-WAN includes Juniper's Contrail Service Orchestration software. The product deploys virtualized network services and manages their interactions with other components of the branch network.

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